I had no interest in online teaching until a colleague who shared my literary background told me he used it to encourage students to engage more deeply with texts.
Since I teach general-education courses that require challenging readings, I thought having students write analyses and submit them online would give them more involvement with the text and me a sharper sense of what they understood. So I signed up for multiple online-teaching workshops, and the following year I substituted a weekly online lesson for about a fourth of my classes.
I thought the courses went well. During the fall semester in 2008, students who were asked to evaluate the online work responded positively, maintaining a tactful silence about my technological ineptitude. I might ask them to analyze specific passages from Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, then articulate their own perspectives on his ideas, providing evidence for their claims. I also asked them to list a number of central ideas from Martin Buber’s I and Thou, to cite supporting passages from the text, and to arrange these ideas into a logical sequence. The following semester I participated in a seminar on building blended courses and found it invigorating. By the end of that academic year, I expected to gradually increase the online component of my classes.
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Over the summer of 2009, I attended the Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I learned that scholars had started looking critically at online instruction to tease out the approaches that genuinely work. Those comments made me realize that although I had enjoyed experimenting in my class, I had little confidence that my innovations generated better work.
My students responded with mildly encouraging remarks, not spectacular results. But their generous reactions the previous fall to my old-fashioned online assignments (such as asking them to analyze a passage of literature using an idea from a philosophic work we read) persuaded me that it made sense to use online work to coax students to think through texts on their own.
I continued to teach a quarter of my course material online, but primarily I had my students write analyses. But a troubling pattern emerged in my two “Philosophy in Literature” sections: Students who attended class, did the reading, and completed the online assignments seemed to enjoy the course and found the online assignments useful. But too many students struggled to complete the course requirements. I wondered if adding the online material had pushed students away. So I dropped the online component the following academic year.
I told my classes I could add online work if students requested it, but not a single student of the 147 enrolled in all my classes asked for it. The same “Philosophy in Literature” classes that had left me wondering the previous semester whether students could handle essential conceptual work went well. Both years, students filled out online evaluations. Since many more filled them out the second year, and the surveys posed different questions, they fall far short of a scientific sample. But the vastly different results are interesting.
I began teaching online because I thought students would be more challenged writing about the texts on their own than talking about them in class. But in fact they thought they learned more and were more challenged intellectually when the course had no online component, even though the online work involved substantial analysis.
Some 74 percent of those who took the course without any regular online assignments rated it as offering a higher-than-average intellectual challenge, compared with 58 percent of those in a course with an online component. Both years, another question asked students how much they had learned. Only 42 percent of those who had done online work evaluated their learning in the course as above average, compared with 63 percent in the course with no online component.
The most interesting contrast shows up in the comments: Those who liked my course with the online modules praised its organization, while students in the course with no online component talked about my enthusiasm, respect for their opinions, and obsession with making sure they understood the texts and assignments—all traits beyond a computer’s reach.
Studying my students’ reactions reminds me that teaching well means participating in a relationship with them. Apparently, turning over a fourth of the course to a computer weakened the bond between us, even though every week I wrote individual responses to their online work. I wondered why students gave me good evaluations the first time I attempted online teaching. Perhaps my blundering won them over. I made many mistakes as I learned to use the technology, so I e-mailed them frequently and anxiously monitored their reactions. They may have appreciated the same thing that students in my traditional classes liked: my concern for their learning.
Meanwhile, the debate over teaching online continues. A speaker at the 2011 Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, Allison Rossett, gave a keynote address called “e-Learning: So Much Talk, So Little Action.” Its description on the conference’s Web page begins, “Recent studies show a decrease in classroom learning and an increase in e-learning.”
As people like those honest souls at the Madison conference keep evaluating technology’s impact, perhaps they will eventually find a way to invest its processes with the sense of shared humanity that binds together students and teachers in successful classes. Until that moment arrives, I’ll leave online teaching to others.
